Facebook has four researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology $ 100,000 paid for their research to protect Internet users. Since last year, Facebook is organizing the " Internet Defense Prize "for researchers who are working to improve the safety of the web.
According to the social networking get offensive security work and theoretical academic research often more recognition than the defensive work to prevent vulnerabilities and reduce the effectiveness of attacks. The price was $ 50,000 last year, which is now doubled to $ 100,000. The four investigators were given a price for their research ( pdf ) to so-called "bad-casting" vulnerabilities, causing memory corruption can occur.
An attacker could then use these types of vulnerabilities for various purposes, such as running code. Despite the impact and the fact that the number of bad-casting increases vulnerabilities, the security community ignores the problem, the researchers said. They decided to do not only investigate this attack vector, but also to develop a tool that can help detect these vulnerabilities. So were discovered via the tool two unknown vulnerabilities in Firefox, which have been patched by now.
